Ranu Uniyal has the adorability that comes from a shifting relationship to English. For no matter how much we love it, we can’t live with it when we know beauty and depth may lie in other languages. ‘Fuck in English/Fuck it now.’
English in me
English is as big as a mustard seed
in my conscience.
I have made a living
all these years
read and chewed
and sometimes failed to digest
its embryonic juices.
Constantly I am being told
you know nothing.
Here is a poseuse
without pauses
or commas
jutting off hyphens
and siphoning
all the prepositions
with umm’s and ho’s.
My desi friends
make fun of
my Sanskrit seeped in
accented English.
They say nimboo pani
as an ideal drink
loses thrill unless
sugar and salt are
adequately mixed.
And my English friends
with stoic disdain
forgive my sins
for they know
she knows not.
Heavenly Father
has always had
the final laugh.
English is the language
I make love in.
English is the language
I have used for my living.
English is the language
I travel in mind, body, and soul.
English is all I could never be.
English is all I will never be.
Fuck English
Fuck it now.
Embrace English
Embrace it now.
Travelling with Papa
Because I have lived
a one and twenty years
in this house
with its wide truncated
corridors, I can smell
you everywhere, on that
broody charpoy, that
sedan brown chair with its
velvety cushions piled on high
and you dazzling like a
laughing Buddha. Unlike him
you had no inch of flesh on you.
Just the smell of neem
and sarson gave you away.
I knew it had to be you
reading Geeta, chanting Ramayana
living on the news from CNN.
The less I travel and stay put
I see you in distant capitals
visiting Eiffel one day
and Louvre the other
tracking the road to Cottingham
searching for a house
in Salmon Grove.
Is it you in Hornsea
waving, gesticulating
with a grim flick of a smile?
See I too have left my soul there
and am hauling the carcass everywhere.
Ranu Uniyal is Professor of English at Lucknow University. An author of six books, her articles and book reviews have been published widely. Her poetry has appeared in Mascara Literary Review (Australia), Jaggery, Medulla Review, Sketch Book, Twenty 20, Whispers (USA), Littlewood Press (UK), Bengal Lights (Bangladesh), Asia Literary Review, Cha (Hongkong), The Enchanting Verses Literary Review, Dhauli Review, Muse India, Kavya Bharati, Femina, Manushi, Indian Literature, Ethos literary journal and several anthologies in India and abroad. She has published three poetry collections: Across the Divide (2006), December Poems (2012), and the most recent The Day We Went Strawberry Picking in Scarborough (2018). She has read her poems at international literature festivals and conferences in Bhubaneswar, Chemnitz, Calicut, Hyderabad, Kolkata, Lancaster, Lucknow, Madrid, Tashkent and Udaipur. She was on a Writer’s residency in 2019 at Uzbekistan. Her poems have been translated in Hindi, Oriya, Malayalam, Spanish, Urdu, and Uzbek. She also writes poetry in Hindi. She is a founding member of a day care centre for children with special needs in Lucknow. She can be reached at ranuuniyalpant@gmail.com | ranuuniyal.com
